An intonational model of Shanghai Wu: A pitch-accent analysis

Abstract

This paper presents an intonational model of Shanghai Wu in the Autosegmental-Metrical framework. Shanghai’s peculiar phrasal tonal system, which spreads lexical tones over sandhi domains, is well-discussed in the literature; however, there is no account of the language's contrastive intonational elements and their phonetic realization. Grounded in phonetic data collected from 14 Shanghainese speakers born between 1945 and 1963, the paper analyzes the language as a pitch-accent system rather than a tonal one, with three distinctive accents: L* + H, H* + L, and L*. These pitch accents pair with one of two accentual phrase-like boundary tones, La and LHa with specific tonotactic requirements. Additionally, I will describe the prosodic hierarchy, as determined by the intonation, as having two levels above the accentual phrase, the intonational phrase (marked via initial pitch range expansion and one of three boundary tones: L%, %, and H%) as well as the major phrase. Together with a labelling system, this analysis allows for easy annotation of Shanghainese tonal events, similar to the ToBI-type models for languages such as Japanese and Serbo-Croatian.This paper presents an intonational model of Shanghai Wu in the Autosegmental-Metrical framework. Shanghai’s peculiar phrasal tonal system, which spreads lexical tones over sandhi domains, is well-discussed in the literature; however, there is no account of the language's contrastive intonational elements and their phonetic realization. Grounded in phonetic data collected from 14 Shanghainese speakers born between 1945 and 1963, the paper analyzes the language as a pitch-accent system rather than a tonal one, with three distinctive accents: L* + H, H* + L, and L*. These pitch accents pair with one of two accentual phrase-like boundary tones, La and LHa with specific tonotactic requirements. Additionally, I will describe the prosodic hierarchy, as determined by the intonation, as having two levels above the accentual phrase, the intonational phrase (marked via initial pitch range expansion and one of three boundary tones: L%, %, and H%) as well as the major phrase. Together with a labelling system, this an...